One of the many intriguing facets of this singular week has been the widely voiced opinion that Roy Hodgson and his rival for the England job, Harry Redknapp, are "the right age" for international football management. Since both men are in their mid-sixties this suggests that for football bosses taking charge of a national team is a sort of halfway house on the road to retirement – like working three days a week in a charity shop. Prevailing wisdom, it appears, is that, for Hodgson, leaving the rigours of working at The Hawthorns to lead England to the European Championship will be pretty much like sorting videos of All Creatures Great and Small into chronological order and trying to look enthusiastic when somebody walks in and hands over a carrier bag containing four moth-eaten cloth coat-hangers and a Jimmy Shand LP.

While implausibly plausible FA voice-over artiste David Davies (who incidentally has recently taken to saying: "But hey …" in the manner of Mr Tony Blair) hasn't sounded so positive about an England managerial appointment since the last one. And the one before that. And Kevin Keegan. Other observers have used the dearth of plausible homegrown candidates to highlight once again the lack of top-class English coaches.

Many reasons have been advanced for the fact this nation's managerial talent pool has as much depth as a Dan Walker interview. The view from here is that the media must shoulder much of the blame. Not so much for the cruel headlines, or the vegetable-head graphics, as for employing far, far too many ex-players. These are men steeped in the traditions of English football like prunes in cling syrup. If they weren't sitting on a pastel‑coloured settee wearing Dad's big-night-out shiny shirts and growling: "And how good a finish is that?" they would undoubtedly be standing on touchlines dressed in padded warm-up coats, yelling "Marco! Marco!" while pointing at their right eye and nodding significantly.

Sadly offered a choice between the cushy life of the TV or radio analyst and the exacting world of professional football coaching, more and more former players are opting for the studio. And who can blame them? Football managers get fired all the time. But the pundits, bar the odd high-profile casualty such as Peter Schmeichel, just babble blandly on forever and ever.

Some top talkers have dipped their toes in the brisk waters of management before scampering back into the warmth of the lights. Mark Lawrenson had spells at Peterborough and Oxford before snuggling down opposite Gary Lineker, Steve Claridge was in charge of Weymouth before the lure of being paid to say "They are just not set up right" over and over again on Radio 5 Live proved too much. Alan Shearer had that little spell at St James' Park, but despite mutterings about Blackburn, seems likely to spend the rest of his days on the MOTD couch. His colleague Alan Hansen, meanwhile, was at one time linked with a triumphant return as boss of Liverpool, before the people of Merseyside finally twigged that he preferred sprawling on his chair rumbling: "As a defender, the one thing that gives you nightmares is people running at you with pace." More and more don't bother at all.

Apparently the FA is going to fight back against the power of the media magnet using the counter attraction of its sleek new epicentre of excellence at St George's Park. Here, it hopes to train a new and thrusting generation of English managers. The selection process for coaches will doubtless be rigorous, but I am sure I am not alone in hoping that hair, or rather lack of it, will be one of the criteria. Put simply, English football management needs more bald men.

Look at the facts. At one time a very, very high percentage of the best managers in England were bald. Bill Shankly, Matt Busby, Ron "The Pope" Greenwood, and Alf Ramsey spring immediately to mind. And there was Stan Cullis at Wolves, an Esperanto-speaking puritanical hardman who never swore, littering his half-time tirades with "flippings and floppings".

Below these hairless giants was a second tier of top-class thin-on-top managers such as grey-faced Ron Saunders who made his players do endless sit-ups with medicine balls because he believed all of a man's strength came from his stomach; Gordon Lee who memorably summed up his philosophy with the words "Just because you're dead doesn't mean you have to lay down and be buried"; and stately Bertie Mee of Arsenal, who began life as a physiotherapist and looked like Edward Duke of Kent.

Strangely in the past two decades the bald coaches – in FA Cup final week let's also mention Jimmy Melia and John Sillett – have all but disappeared from our sporting landscape, and with them an entire generation of British bosses has been lost. The last bald gaffer to win a major prize was Howard Kendall. The foolishness of youth is no excuse. Roy Hodgson is 64, Harry Redknapp 65, Sir Alex Ferguson 70. All have had plenty of chance to lose their hair and send out a signal. All have simply ignored it.

There are no longer the role models to inspire young balding men to go into management, as Herbert Chapman once did Cullis, Busby and their coot-pated coevals. As a result a strata of our society that might have saved David Bernstein the ignominy of having to pretend he had a long list of candidates for the England job by waving about a bit of paper with last night's takeaway order scribbled on it has dropped through the net leaving us to clutch at well‑thatched straws such as Aidy Boothroyd and Steve Bruce. The FA must address the problem forthwith. Giving David Platt a high-profile job would surely be a step in the right direction.